Arriving in Montepuez!

October 7, 2013

So given that I am the worst blogger ever I will try to bring you up to date on events that have unfolded since I arrived in Montepuez two months ago.

After our swearing in ceremony on August 6 those of us who were placed in the northern part of Mozambique flew to Nampula, the capital of its eponymous province.  There we had a two-day “Supervisor’s Conference” where we met our counterparts and supervisors with whom we will be working for the next two years.  The point of the conference was mostly to lay a foundation of the relationship between Peace Corps and our host organizations.  This is done more as an insurance policy just in case our organizations start getting into any funny business and Peace Corps can say we talked about these policies with you and your volunteer.  For us volunteers, Supervisor’s Conference was more a last two days together than business of any sort so we tried to spend as much time as we could together knowing it would be a few months before we saw one another again.

After Supervisor’s Conference I went to Pemba with my organization, Fundacao Ariel Glaser, for another short conference that served as an introduction to the organization – what they do, what their goals are, where they work, etc.  There were four volunteers placed with Ariel in various parts of Cabo Delgado Province so we got to spend an extra four days with each other.  I’m not sure I really got anything out of the conference, but staying in a hotel with a balcony that overlooks Praia do Wimbi (that’s Wimbi Beach for all the non-Portuguese speakers out there) was a pretty sweet deal.  (And you should totally Google Image ‘Wimbi Beach’ to see what exactly Peace Corps life is all about). 

A little background on Fundacao Ariel.  There is a large American Non-Government Organization called the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, or EGPAF.  EGPAF was founded in 1988 with the goal of eliminating pediatric AIDS.  Elizabeth Glaser contracted HIV through a blood transfusion in 1981 and passed the virus on to both of her children.  Her daughter, Ariel, contracted HIV through breastfeeding and her son contracted HIV in-utero.  Ariel died of AIDS in 1988 at the age of 4 and thus EGPAF was born.  EGPAF has been working in Mozambique since 2004 in three provinces, Cabo Delgado, Nampula and Gaza.  In 2009, as a part of PEPFAR II (PEPFAR stands for President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief and was started by President Bush in 2003 – arguably the best thing he did as President), President Obama included the goal of transferring HIV/AIDS work to local organizations as a part of USAIDs plan for sustainable development.  Ultimately this will result in Mozambicans taking care of Mozambique’s problems, but the idea is still in its infancy.  One of the first organizations created after this announcement, however, was Fundacao Ariel.  It is 100 percent run by Mozambicans, although they receive almost all of their funding from CDC.  They took over EGPAF’s role in Cabo Delgado in 2010 but maintain a working relationship with EGPAF.  They even use the same logo as EGPAF.  The main work that Ariel and EGPAF do is to get as many HIV+ pregnant women on treatment as possible in order to reduce the probability that she will pass the virus onto her child.  A woman has roughly a 45% chance of passing the virus onto her child if she is not on any treatment, but that number falls to 2% if she is on treatment.  Additionally, in 2012 53% of pregnant women received treatment globally, which is up from just 14% in 2005.  So you can see the importance of receiving treatment and how effective various programs have been implemented worldwide in order to reduce Vertical Transmission.  It’s some pretty cool stuff.  

I finally moved into my house in Montepuez on August 14 and I have to say it is far nicer than I ever thought it would be.  I had heard that I was going to have a mud brick house because that is what the Health volunteer before me had and I was totally fine with that.  But when we pulled up to my house and it was a cement house with two bedrooms, a living room, kitchen, and indoor bathroom I couldn’t help but smile really hard knowing I lucked out with a great house. 

My house in located in Bairro Matuto I.  It is a seriously beautiful neighborhood with small alleys running in every direction and palm trees drape the background no matter which direction you look.  It is a fantastic location for the things I need.  I am a 10 minute walk to the hospital and Community Based Organization (CBO) where I work and 15 minutes to the market, bus station, and the house of the education volunteers in Montepuez. 

One of the things Peace Corps drills into you during training is the importance of integrating into your community.  I swear that by the end of training my least favorite word in the English language was integration because we heard about it every day we were in Namaacha.  I understood that it is definitely an important aspect of my service, but I just felt like it was dwelled upon too often.  That being said, integration is a lot tougher than I thought it was going to be and I now understand why certain aspects of integration were such a huge part of training.  I thought I was going to move into my house and within the first month all of my neighbors would stop by my house, awkwardly introduce themselves and ask me some questions about myself.  If nothing else, I thought this would happen because I am the big white kid living in the neighborhood.  Surprisingly, though, only two people have actually come to my house to introduce themselves.  Although there is a water hose in my front yard where a number of neighborhood women get their water, not one of them has actually stopped to talk to me.  I have tried to say hello and have some small talk with them when I need water myself, but they spend most of their time talking to one another in the local language, Macua (or Makua, Makuah, or the other 12 ways you spell it), so it is really tough to actually insert myself into one of their conversations.  And let’s be honest, I have never really been one for small talk anyway.  Even at home I don’t really enjoy small talk because it all seems so superficial and I think it really arises out of people feeling awkward in silence with another person.   Anyway, I haven’t done the best job integrating into my neighborhood, but it’s only been two months – I’m getting there. 

Switching topics – I spend most of my time working at the Hospital Rural de Montepuez.  It is the major hospital in the Montepuez district where people come if they have more serious issues that cannot be treated at the local health centers in their villages.  I go to the hospital Monday-Thursday and spend most of my time there in the office responsible for statistics, data collection, and patient filing.  I was surprised to learn that the hospital has an online file of all patients it has received since 2000.  I was expecting filing cabinets to be overstuffed, unorganized and unusable, but I was pleasantly surprised to see the online filing.  As for what I do on a day-to-day basis I’m really not sure I can say.  I generally arrive to the hospital 8:30 (which is extremely late compared to when most volunteers start their day, but I am not complaining) and sit in the office for about an hour and until somebody realizes I am there and not doing anything.  (I usually bring my Kindle or a book because I know there is a lot of down time and I’m not always going to be doing something).  I might help someone with something they are working on for an hour or two and then I go back to doing nothing until around 12:30 or 1.  (As an example, I am writing this blog post from my desk in the hospital right now).  By that time if I am still doing nothing I will call it a day and head to the market to buy whatever food or other things I need for the day.  On Friday’s I go to the CBO in Montepuez that receives funding from Ariel, called Associacao de Cuidados Domiciliarios de Montepuez (ACDM).  They mostly do things called “buscas activas” which essentially entail the members of the CBO going into neighborhoods in search of HIV+ people who have abandoned their treatment to try to find out what happened to them and convince them to restart treatment.  Each member of the CBO is also responsible for weekly visits to different HIV+ people who are on treatment to see how they are doing, ask if they need any support or help, and reinforce the fact that they need to continue taking their medication.  It’s some pretty intense stuff, but it is definitely reassuring to know that there are organizations out there doing what they can to help those people most neglected by their own society.

In the next few weeks there are a lot of exciting things happening.  Next week I will be going to Pemba for the first official conference with Ariel.  We are supposed to have monthly conferences in Pemba to discuss what we have been working on, what we should be doing, how to go about different things, etc.  It’s a good way for everyone in the province to hear about what different people are doing and what they have found to be effective.  I highly doubt the meetings will happen every month, but even if I were to go to Pemba for a full week every other month, accommodation and per diem included, that would be a pretty sweet deal. 

The first week of November is the first big Peace Corps conference for those of us in Moz 20. (I don’t know if I explained before, but every new group is given a number that corresponds to which group they are in that particular country and I am a part of the 20^th group of volunteers in Mozambique).  There are three official Peace Corps conferences where everyone in Moz 20 gets together to get away from site, see their fellow volunteers, and talk about all the stressors that no one at site can really understand.  So November 3 I will be leaving for Maputo for the entire week and I will see all the people in Moz 20 who I last saw the first week of August.  I’m really looking forward to it and it should be a great time.

After I return from Maputo I will have about a month in Montepuez before the holidays in Mozambique start.  From what I understand the whole country more or less shuts down between December 15 and January 15 so it will be nice again to have some free time and the opportunity to visit some other volunteers at their sites and see different parts of the country.